The internet has democratized so much of our society, but nothing more than hating baseball teams. A generation ago, everyone was sick to death of the Yankees, but now it seems like half the league is one obnoxious fan tweet or one ill-timed bat flip or clueless GM comment from becoming the pariah of the week. It can get a little hard to track sometimes.

So in some respects, this week’s Juan Soto trade is a welcome throwback to old times. A no-doubt top-tier superstar has drifted across the great material continuum and found himself, almost by accident, resplendent in pinstripes and razor burn. A trade to make Yankees fans rejoice, and the vast majority of our great, God-fearing nation go, “Ugh, these freakin’ guys.”

Nevertheless, Soto’s arrival in New York offers an opportunity to witness something unusual. Assuming Aaron Boone figures out that Soto should go in front of Aaron Judge in the batting order, we’re about to see the best on-base guy of his generation batting ahead of the best power hitter of his generation.

Personally, I think there’s been too much attention paid to how many home runs Soto could hit when confronted with Babe Ruth’s short porch in right field. Soto has plenty of power, but that’s not his game. He has never hit more than 35 home runs in a season, and has only broken 30 twice in six seasons.

On the other hand, Soto has drawn at least 130 walks in each of the past three seasons. The only other active player with three 130-walk seasons is Joey Votto, and by the time Soto makes his Yankees debut, Votto might be a full-time TikToker and not an active ballplayer. The only player with more 130-walk seasons in the expansion era is Barry Bonds:

And again, Soto is 25 years old. If you’re unimpressed with a raw walk total, how about this list of the highest OBPs since 2000:

This is pretty close to a list of the best hitters of the past 25 years. Judge is not too far off, with an OBP of .396; Bryce Harper, Yordan Alvarez, and Freddie Freeman are all in the top 25 as well. But Soto is up there, tied with Hall of Famer Larry Walker for the best non-Bonds OBP of the 21st century.

The point is, Soto is on base all the time, and since the days of Ty Cobb and Wahoo Sam Crawford, we’ve known a certain truth about baseball: You want a guy who gets on base at the top of the lineup, and a guy who hits for power behind him to drive him in.

If I were Aaron Boone, I might lead Soto off and hit Judge second, just to get this pair up as much as possible. I saw a mocked-up Yankees lineup with Soto second and Judge third. That’d be fine too. Or Soto third and Judge fourth — anything that gets them up near the top of the order with Soto ahead of Judge.

I don’t love the Yankees lineup as currently constituted. After Soto and Judge, there’s a big drop-off to players who are old, injury-prone, or just not all that good to begin with. But this pair could be an offense all to themselves.

I’ve picked two cutoff points for OBP and SLG and run them through Stahead: a .440 OBP, which Soto has reached twice, and a .610 SLG, which Judge has reached three times. Let’s say that’s on the optimistic side of reasonable for this pair.

In the AL/NL era, a hitter gets to these cutoff points about twice a season. The most common way for a single team to have a .440 OBP season and a .610 SLG season in the same lineup is for one player to hit both marks. In the 1940s and 1950s, one Stan Musial, Ted Williams, or Mickey Mantle would do both basically every season.

But on 24 occasions in AL/NL history, a single team has had one player with a .440 OBP and a different player reach a .610 SLG:

I want you to understand that when I talk about Soto as a potentially historic on-base/power combination, this is what I’m talking about without an ounce of hyperbole. Okay, maybe not literally Ruth/Gehrig, but Edgar Martinez and Ken Griffey Jr., or Bill Terry and Mel Ott. Soto will be a Hall of Famer unless he retires to pursue a culinary career before he turns 30; Judge might have a hard time overcoming the late start to his career, but he’s inarguably having a Hall of Fame peak. And when you put two Hall of Famers with complementary skill sets together in a lineup, this is what you get.

Take another look at this list and see if you notice anything. There’s the 1927 and 1961 Yankees, Hack Wilson’s 191-RBI season, and some historically great offenses. But the one thing every set of teammates on this list has in common is that they played during a bonkers offensive era. From the introduction of the live ball to World War II was basically pinball played in jewel box ballparks. It made late-1990s college baseball look like the Dead Ball Era. The only post-integration teams on the list played either in 1961 — a lefty and a switch hitter in old Yankee Stadium in an expansion year — or the Steroid Era.

That’s why, whatever Soto and Judge do, they probably won’t set any actual records. The all-time single-season record for runs scored is 198, set by Sliding Billy Hamilton in 1894. That probably won’t be coming down anytime soon. Ruth set the modern record for runs scored in 1921. Gehrig scored 167 in 1936, which is not only the second-highest mark of the modern era, it’s also the most recent season in which anyone’s gotten closer than 25 runs to Ruth.

It’s the same with RBI. Wilson’s 191 was most recently challenged by Gehrig. Manny Ramirez has the post-World War II record, 165, and only three 21st century players have driven in 150 runs in a season. Judge set a career high of 131 in his 62-homer campaign two seasons ago.

So what should our measure for historic success be? In order to find out, I got into Excel, which you should read in the same tone as “Oh no, Grandma got into the schnapps again.”

I considered just filtering out every season from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1990s and coming up with a list of top run-scorers from normal offensive environments. But instead, I whipped up a quick(ish) and dirty (definitely) adjustment for offensive environment. I took the top run-scoring seasons in baseball history and calculated how many runs the player scored per team game: 154 games from 1901 to 1960, and 162 from 1961 to present, with the exceptions of seasons shortened by work stoppages or global pestilence. (The league averages turned out to be 107 games for 1981, 114 for 1994, 144 for 1995, and 60 for 2020.)

This way of measuring things is not without its hazards; for instance, I’m about to show you a leaderboard that credits Cobb with two of the best run-scoring seasons ever, based on the assumption that the Tigers played 154 games in those seasons. In fact, Cobb played 156 games in those seasons, thanks to a handful of games being called off as ties in each season. (“More like Tie Cobb,” you might say.)

With each player’s runs per team game in hand, I created a scoring coefficient for each season by dividing the mean of each year’s scoring average (about 4.42 runs per team per game) by each season’s league-wide scoring average. Multiplying that number by the player’s runs scored per team game yielded an adjusted R/TG figure and an adjusted run total. You could be quite a bit more rigorous about this by using park factors and more complex measures of the scoring environment, but that’s a project for another day, and almost certainly another writer.

Anyway, here are the best adjusted run-scoring seasons in AL/NL history:

So this is a list of four of the top 10 or 15 position players of all time, plus Tommy Leach. And because I know you’re wondering who the hell Tommy Leach was: He’s the guy who hit second on the 1909 Pirates. The next two guys in the lineup were Hall of Famer Fred Clarke and Honus Wagner, whom you might know. Which would seem to illustrate the importance to Soto of having Judge behind him this coming season.

But this is just a list of old-timey guys. You have to get out of the top 10 to even get past integration. So here are the top 10 adjusted run-scoring seasons of the expansion era:

I was starting to get worried about how far into this post I’d gone without seeing Rickey Henderson’s name. But seeing Acuña on that list just makes me want to jump ahead to what we should really be judging Soto (and, by extension, Judge) against in 2024. These are the best run-scoring seasons of the Wild Card era:

Well, almost. No. 10 on the list was Freeman in 2020, and while I’m willing to countenance a little bit of schedule wonkiness, especially on the post-1961 list, 60 games is a bit extreme. Plus, knocking Freeman off allowed me to include 2000 Jeff Bagwell, who holds the post-World War II record for runs scored in a season.

(Brace yourself, I’m about to start a sentence about the reigning unanimous NL MVP with “I think it went a little under the radar…”)

I think it went a little under the radar that Acuña scored 149 runs this past season. That’s the most since Bagwell and the third-highest total since 1901 in a season in which league-wide scoring was not at least 9% above the historic average. (No. 1 and no. 2 were Ruth in 1920 and Ted Williams in 1949.)

It took a perfect confluence of events. Not only did Acuña have a .416 OBP and advance himself along the bases by stealing 73 bags, he played 159 games, all starts, and led off every game he played. More than that, the three most common hitters behind him were Ozzie Albies, Austin Riley, and Matt Olson. All three of those hitters slugged .510 or better; Olson hit 54 home runs. Few players have ever put themselves in a better position to score runs, and few players have ever had so much support from their teammates.

What would count as a historically great run-scoring season for Soto? Let’s call it 0.80 adjusted runs scored per team game. We actually had a pretty wild swing in run-scoring environment from 2022 to 2023 — there were some rule changes, I don’t know if you heard. Scoring was about 3% down from the historic average in 2022, but 4.5% over the average in 2023. But 130 to 140 runs would qualify as an all-time great scoring season from Soto.

But the Acuña example raises an obvious question for next year’s Yankees: Who hits behind Judge? If Giancarlo Stanton is healthy (and I’ll wait for you to stop laughing), both Soto and Judge could be in for monster run-scoring seasons. Otherwise, the Yankees might need another big move, or an unexpected breakout season.

Or perhaps I’ve misread this whole thing, and the big story for 2024 is not going to be Soto’s 140-run season, but Anthony Rizzo’s 170-RBI season hitting behind Soto and Judge.

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